My soup was probably the best I've ever made, now if I could recall what I did ....
We use NCL to do our air travel when on cruises, it's much cheaper and often entails two one way trips. The problem of course is we'd be in the back on LONG flights. The ticket claims it's not upgradeable, but is, as I noted. We're mostly Delta customers and have the Delta AMEX card which helps, but NCL has put us on American once and United once and Delta once. I think 80% of the flights out of here are Delta, so it's a bit weird, but whatever. I now have lower level CCs for United/AA which seem to enable me to upgrade at some cost.
I found that "status" on Delta does not get one upgraded on international flights even if seats are open. Airlines have started a class between Comfort Plus and what is called Delta One (premium, first, whatever) that is pretty nice but also pricey. I'm not sure it's worth it. Delta One is very nice, but you're looking at a $7K ticket to France, or more. Nope.
